Watersports involving powered watercraft have enjoyed a long history. Recently, watersports have emerged which are conducted in the intentionally enhanced wake of a watercraft. Such pursuits are collectively referred to as “wakesports” and include wakeboarding, wakesurfing, and wakeskating. The specialized boats used to create the enhanced wakes associated with wakesports are referred to in the industry as “wakeboats”.
Wakeboats create their enhanced wakes using a variety of techniques. The primary cause of a boat's wake is the displacement of water by its hull. Changes to the hull's orientation in the surrounding water directly affect the size, shape, and perceived quality of the resulting wake. As wakesports have become more popular, many different techniques have been developed to alter the orientation of a wakeboat's hull in the water and thus change the nature of the wake it produces.
When optimizing the wake for a particular watersports participant, and especially when seeking to reproduce wake conditions achieved at some time in the past, the entire relationship between the hull and the body of water in which it is moving must be taken into account. As noted above, the behavior of the wake is primarily controlled by how the hull displaces the water, which is in turn controlled by the draft and angles of the wakeboat hull in the water. When a preferred wake has been achieved through careful arrangement of such factors as ballast amounts and trim tab settings, it is very desirable to “store” the hull conditions which resulted in the preferred wake behavior. Ideally, the same preferred wake could then be reproduced by recalling the stored conditions and duplicating them.
Some existing wake enhancement systems attempt to provide such a “store and recall” feature. One common approach is to remember the amount of ballast in various ballast chambers situated around the boat, on the premise that if the same amount of ballast is later restored to those compartments the attitude of the hull will be duplicated and the preferred wake duplicated as well.
The reality is not so simple. Hull attitude is affected by many factors beyond just ballast amounts, including but in no way limited to the amount of fuel onboard, the amount of equipment onboard, the number of passengers onboard, and the relative weight and positioning of all of these variables. Worse, these factors can and do change in real time such as when passengers embark and disembark or move around within the wakeboat, or fuel is consumed or refilled during a day's operation.
Compounding these realities is the fact that boating in general, and watersports in particular, are often very social events. Passengers come and go during a single outing. Even changing the current watersport participant (say, from a heavier to a lighter wakeboarder) alters the amount and distribution of weight in the hull. All of this may involve small children to large adults. These very natural occurrences cause multi-hundred pound changes in weight distribution, corresponding substantial changes in hull angles and draft, and thus significant variability in the wake produced.
Wake control systems flatly ignore such changes and the effects they have on hull orientation. By relying on the fiction that identical ballast and trim tab settings will yield an identical relationship between hull and water, they fail to measure and/or accommodate for the substantial effects of day to day, and sometimes minute to minute, changes in equipment and passengers on board the wakeboat. These deficiencies can lead to significant frustration of wakeboat owners, angry customer service calls to wakeboat dealers, and damage to the reputation of wakeboat manufacturers.
More recently, advanced wake control systems have finally recognized the need to measure and control the actual hull of the wakeboat. Instead of mistakenly focusing on accessories such as ballast and trim tabs, these advanced systems measure the actual relationship of the hull to the surrounding water and then adjust the ballast, trim tabs, and other accessories to restore the hull to the same conditions. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,798,825 issued Aug. 5, 2014, the entirety of which is incorporated by reference herein.